The Anatomy of Fashion Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today

Clothes take the ordinary human body and fashion it into something remarkable. Born to the same anatomical legacy, each generation has used garments to shape itself in the image of its own particular desires. Taking different body parts in turn, The Anatomy of Fashion invites us to view ourselves as we have been in the past. Arguing that analysis needs to aspire to the proliferation and playfulness of fashion itself, the chapters both explore a different aesthetic and examine its wider, and often surprising, implications. In countless different ways, fashion is caught up in the larger picture of its chronological moment. Whether in the mechanisms of production, the politics of consumption, the construction of sexuality or gender, or the formation and reformation of manners and morals, fashion is there. In its provocative conclusion The Anatomy of Fashion turns its attention to dress practices today. Reassembling the anatomical parts, the text places the contemporary body in the historical view and reveals the strangeness that lies at the heart of our own normality.

Susan J.Vincent is an honorary visiting fellow at the University of York. Her research interests to date have centred about the cultural history of dress in the early modern period. She is the author of Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Berg, 2003).